April 2006 Archives

With a name that sounds like my favorite candy, Rollyo takes over where the Gigablast custom search left off. Peggy Garvin describes how to use Rollyo to create a search engine that searches your own choice of web sites in her recent LLRX.com article, "The Government Domain - Roll Your Own Government Search."

There are several fun Rollyo searches that are already available for your use:

Amy Wharton has created Law Library List to search the law-lib archives, as well as Legal Research Guides and News, with a selection of research-related sites. (P.S to Amy, you might want to add Zimmerman's Research Guide to the mix!)

Dennis Kennedy has compiled on for Legal Technology, which includes a great selection of blogs and web sites on the topic.

I particularly liked the current annual content winner, Ask Mr. Fix-It, for it's excellent collection of DIY sites. I quickly and easily found information on how to repair grout.

For more possibilities, review the Explore Rollyo section to find your own favorites, making sure to register so you can easily keep track of them by adding them to to your profile.

Rollyo makes it easy to add your selection of searches to your web site or Intranet. I've added these searches, plus my own "Tech Product Reviews" search, to LawLibTech.com.

So does anyone have any suggested sites for Tech Product Reviews? It currently searches PC World, PC Magazine, Cnet, ZDnet, and E-opinions, and am looking for more nominations.

RSS isn't email. And many people, including me, like it that way. I prefer collecting all my list email and RSS feeds in my Bloglines account where the stuff doesn't clutter up my inbox. Of course, there are RSS readers such as Newsgator, Attensa For Outlook, and soon, Microsoft Outlook 12, that will display RSS feeds within Outlook, which can certainly be a convenient alternative.

But if you don't monitor many RSS feeds, it may not be worth it to install an additional application and if you're using a web-based aggregator such as Bloglines for just a few feeds, you can easily forget to read them altogether. That's why it's good to know about some of the available services that convert RSS to email, notifying you whenever there's new headlines for you to puruse.

Librarian in Black notes that Feedburner is now offering an RSS to email feed option to publishers. However, this service is only available to recpients if the blog publisher offers it.

Bloglet, used by LawLibTech.com, is another tool available to bloggers and webmasters to enable email subscriptions to RSS feeds. Enhancements or changes to this service haven't been made in years, though it continues to function...some of the time. From a publisher's standpoint, the inability to easily download a list of all subscribers is a definite drawback to this service. If you register with Bloglet, you can subscribe to any RSS feed, regardless of whether the blog/site offers a Bloglet subscribe option.

R|Mail is another option for RSS to email delivery, and requires nothing more than an email address and the URL of the feed you wish to subscribe to. Registration is not necessary. In my experience, R|mail has been considerably more stable than Bloglet.

Other similar products include:

Feedblitz - Will import subscription lists from Bloglet. Hmm, I'm tempted....

Squeet - Incudes a keyword search option, notifying you of new content from Google News.

Zookoda.com/ - Allows publishers/bloggers to create customized newsletters for content delivery.

Blogarithm.com - Notifies you of new content on any web page, including blogs, via a once a day email with links to updated pages.

BotABlog - Very similar to Blogarithm.

So just because you don't want to be bothered with a RSS reader doesn't mean you can't keep your eye on your favorite blog!

I really enjoyed the recent article by Jennifer S. Murray in the March 2006 AALL Spectrum, 10 Steps to Releasing Your Inner Public Speaker. In tip #1, "Seek it Out", Jennifer compares public speaking to using eye drops. "It goes against your instincts." Another of my favorites, #5, is "Don't be afraid of the pause." As she points out, if you want to encourage questions, pausing can create the opportunity, and sometimes just out of the desire to fill the pause, someone will finally pop up with a comment or question. I think this is especially true in a web conferencing environment, where dead air can seem to last forever. Just remember, if there's no dead air, there's no possiblity of interaction with the audience.

"10 Steps" is short, to the point, and clever. I'll bet Jennifer's speeches are, too!

Jenny Kanji, a veteran of the " ___Sites in ___ Minutes" presentation genre, and I, a newcomer to the format, had the pleasure of presenting 45 Sites in 45 Minutes at the recent California Joint Institute. The emphasis is on California regulation and politics, but you'll find a bit of an eclectic mix ranging from a podcast search engine to a dancing Bush.

I would never depend upon a live Internet connection for this kind of presentation. You could easily end up spending half of a precious minute loading the page! That's assuming that nothing goes wrong with the connection or the web site, in which case you're left with.....nothing. So some experimentation was in order. In the end, I spent a good part of my precious preparation time trying to figure out the best way to save and retrieve web pages.

Jenny uses CatchtheWeb, so I figured whatever is good enough for Jenny is good enough for me, and it worked great for Jenny. However, it's no longer available for download or support.

Of course, I considered saving screenshots in PowerPoint, but I wanted to be able to display and scroll down the entire page, not just the part that would fit on a PowerPoint slide. I played around with Adobe Acrobat, and thought that it might work in full-screen mode, but it didn't seem an elegant solution. I thought working within the browser, as CatchTheWeb does, would better simulate a real browsing experience.

So I did some more research, checking on various tools that I've seen recommended for this purpose and decided to try Net Snippets, a popular favorite. It was easy to use, and seemed to work in a very similar manner to CatchtheWeb. An additional advantage is the ability to upload your snippets to the Esnips web site.

This method wasn't without it's drawbacks. There were a couple of pages that simply couldn't be captured exactly as they appear on the web, either in Net Snippets or Adobe Acrobat, including the NPR Podcast Page, and the EPA's Window to My Environment, so the live connection did come in handy. But otherwise, it proved to be an ideal solution.

Many of the tools in this category are not strictly intended as presentation tools, but rather as ways to compile, save and present your research. After using Net Snippets, I'm still not convinced that it's a better way to go than Adobe Acrobat for collecting research results, but I'm going to continue to experiment with it. I'm a bit handicapped because I'm using the free version, and from what I hear, the professional version's ability to create a report with all your snippets, complete with a table of contents, is worth the price of admission. For more information see:

• Organization Redux: Net Snippets (Searcher, Jan. 2005)

• Net Snippets Professional Edition 3.1.1 (Law Office Computing, Oct. 2004) (This article can be accessed from the Net Snippets Press Coverage page.)
  

I'd be very interested in hearing what tools you use for web presentations and/or the compilation and reporting of research!